Authoritative, Accountable Positioning and Connected, General Knowing: Progressive Themes in Understanding Transfer

Abstract

Engle's (this issue) analysis of framing students' contributions in learning interactions to construct generality and Marton's (this issue) discussion of learning to discern differences make valuable contributions to the ongoing scientific effort to understand transfer. This commentary characterizes these articles as contributing to 2 valuable themes of recent and ongoing research on transfer. One involves positioning of students in activity systems where they can learn or where their transfer is assessed. The other involves characteristics of knowing in conceptual domains. Based on the contributions of Engle, Marton, and others, this commentary conjectures that positioning with authority and accountability in learning and transfer settings (cf., Engle & Conant, 2002) and learning that develops connected knowing of affordances and constraints that are broadly characteristic of a domain (cf., Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, & Tarule, 1986; Gibson, 1979) are probably important contributing factors in supporting positive transfer.